


The Hanging Wood

by thedevilchicken



Category: GoldenEye (1995)
Genre: Dark, Dreams and Nightmares, Horror, M/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-28
Updated: 2003-12-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 20:02:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4234794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James has a nightmare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hanging Wood

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to Livejournal on 28 December 2003.

He woke up standing, except he wasn’t awake. He knew it was a dream, since there’s nowhere on earth where the darkness is naturally blue, like an old movie cliché of the twilight. But he felt as if he’d woken. It was an uneasy feeling. 

He was standing at the edge of a wood. He could see nothing before him but trees and nothing behind him except for mile upon mile of blank blue-white fields – a blue-white that he realised was snow. He was standing on snow, barefoot and bare-chested, in just the bottom half of a pair of charcoal-grey pyjamas. He almost shivered before he realised he wasn’t cold. 

There was a signpost to his left. He could have sworn that it hadn’t been there just a moment before but he stepped up to it, the snow crinkling like shredded paper under his feet. On it were the words ‘this way’ etched into the wood; the handwriting was unnervingly familiar and the arrow beneath it pointed into the wood. There was really no choice but to follow its direction. And besides which, it was only a dream. 

The further in he went, the less real it seemed. It was like a film set or perhaps a stage prepared for a play, fake snow spread out beneath his feet and all the trees made from papier mache painted brown, everything bathed in that same eerie blue light. But when he looked up, the sky seemed _so_ real, a sheet of black velvet strewn with twinkling diamond stars. His feet and the ankles of his pyjamas were covered with white dust. He hadn’t a clue where he was going, except for the signposts, each one the same, nailed to the not-quite-right trees. 

Then the trees were suddenly closer together, like they’d taken a step in while he wasn’t watching. He felt hemmed in, claustrophobic – it wasn’t quite panic but it was more than unease. He had to push back the branches to make his way through, and they scratched at his arms, but when he looked down, there were no scratches, no blood. He wasn’t sure that it even hurt, though he knew that it should. 

The light dimmed, like someone just off-stage had turned down the house lights. He had to concentrate to see where he was going now, narrow his eyes. The branches pulled at his hair and the fabric over his legs. The snow that wasn’t really snow got thicker. He wanted to turn back; he turned but the trees had closed in behind him. Something was very, very wrong. 

He pushed back a branch and he stumbled. He fell to his knees on the edge of a clearing; looking up, he saw the face of the huge blue moon shining up above the treetops. The trees were taller than he’d thought, towering above him, making him feel so infinitesimally small by comparison. He supposed that he was, just a half-dressed man in the middle of a dark, endless forest. Slowly, he stood. 

There was a tree at the far side of the clearing, maybe two hundred metres away. It was taller than the others, towering above them as they towered above him; its trunk was thick with branches, laden with snow, and there was something else… there was something hanging there. But it was shadowed and he couldn’t see. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to, now it came to it, but he knew that he had to. He stepped slowly toward it. 

The snow under his feet became colder, wetter. He wrapped his arms around himself as he shuddered. The wind was picking up, whistling through the treetops. He stepped closer. 

Then he knew what it was. It was hanging from a rope, hanging just a couple of feet from the floor of the forest, hanging from the highest branch of that tallest tree. It was a body. There was a man hanging there. 

The noose was looped around his neck and he hung from it, swaying there awkwardly in the breeze, dead. His arms and his legs hung leaden from his body and his head hung forward, sagging against his chest. His skin was pale and blue under the huge, unnatural moon. His hair was blond. His hands were familiar. He knew that dead, muscular chest; he knew the black trousers and the bare feet, knew the white-blue forehead and the bullet hole he saw there, terrible black-red. 

“Alec.” 

His voice echoed through the wood. He stared. He couldn’t look away. 

He reached up and took the corpse’s hand; it was cold against his skin, almost hard, not the way it should have been, not the way he remembered. He ran his fingertips over the inside of the corpse’s wrist, pressed them hard against it as though searching for a pulse that he knew he couldn’t find. And he didn’t. 

Alec’s eyes were closed. He looked so peaceful, so calm in death, his lips so pale and his hair frosted over with snow. Real snow. It was snowing now, in huge, freezing flakes that melted over James’ shoulders into rivulets of water. He looked down, brushed them from his chest with the hand that just a second ago had held Alec’s dead hand. He shivered, and it wasn’t from the cold. 

He looked up; there was a signpost above Alec’s head. _Bois de la corde_ , it read. James frowned, wondering what that was supposed to mean. 

Alec opened his eyes. “The Hanging Wood,” he said in his dead, hollow voice.

James opened his mouth but he couldn’t find the words to speak. He stared into Alec’s eyes; they were so blue, so horribly blue in the light of the big blue moon, icy topaz set in his dead lover’s face. It was snowing harder. It settled over Alec’s hair and his shoulders, settled on the lashes of his open eyes. 

He stared until he could stare no more. He blinked, and when his eyes reopened after that one split-second, he was everywhere. Hanging from every tree around the clearing. Alec, hanging, dead. There were hundreds of him. James fell to his knees and he sobbed into his hands. 

The snow melted under the heat of his skin, soaked into his knees, and he sobbed. He closed his eyes but he knew that they were there; the weight of a thousand eyes was on him, cold and relentless, unblinking, accusing. He shuddered, pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. Then he looked up. They were gone. All except for the first. 

“I’ve been brutally torn apart,” said the corpse. James trembled, his gaze straying to the bloody bullet hole between Alec’s eyes. “I appear to be holding something.” And then his eyes closed. 

“Alec?”

The only answer that came was the howl of the wind through the trees. 

Somehow, he found the strength to stand. His feet were numb, his hands icy; he could see his breath on the air. The noise through the trees was louder now, the howl becoming a roar, and no, it wasn’t one noise but many, a great roaring dissonance that rang in his ears and made Alec’s body swing from the tree. His back was grazing against the bark, an awful scratching beneath that roar. James almost couldn’t bear to look, but he looked, and he looked at his hands. One was closed. It was balled into a fist. 

He stepped forward and took him by the wrist; the body was colder now, almost frozen, reminding him of cattle in a meat locker. He could almost see a hook through Alec’s body, shoved through under his shoulder blades and out from under his collarbone. 

James pried open his lover’s cold dead hand. He half expected Alec to move, to cut himself down, except he didn’t. There was a slip of paper inside, balled up; he opened it, smoothed it out over his palm, and read. 

‘On ne vit que deux fois,’ it said. ‘You only live twice.’ The handwriting was his own. He’d known it was his all along; the signs, the paper – it was all his writing. He’d written it all himself. 

He turned away briefly and the way back was open; he wondered if he should leave, but he knew that he couldn’t. So he sat down instead, at the foot of the tallest tree. He rested his back against it and he reached up for Alec’s cold hand just once more. It didn’t feel so very cold, but James knew that was because he was colder himself. He was so very, very cold. He could barely feel himself anymore. 

He almost wished that Alec would open his eyes again. He almost wished he could hear his voice, though it chilled him. But he was dead, and James felt like he’d killed him twice over.

“On ne vit que deux fois,” he said. “Alec’s had both his lives.” 

He closed his eyes. He rested his head against Alec’s cold calf and felt the snow whirl around him, heard the wind roar in his ears. His tears turned to ice on his cheeks; he knew though he didn’t feel it. And besides, it was only a dream. 

***

His bed was warm. It was a little _too_ warm, and he’d kicked off his blanket in the night, off onto the hardwood floor where it lay, a pool of stark powder blue. His feet were cold. His chest felt hollow. 

“Alec,” he said.

He reached out; his hand ghosted over the sheet, over the empty space at his side. He didn’t open his eyes. He screwed them tightly shut. 

Months now, since he’d been gone. The bed still smelled of him.


End file.
